Mar 28, 2017

Maxine Waters is such a ridiculous clown! How can anyone take her seriously when the lies just fly out of her mouth!
Bill O’Reilly calls her out for the James Brown wig…You can bet he’s in a whole heap of trouble for this comment! The left is calling for O’Reilly to be fired.

Seems to be a double standard here because the left has been calling President Trump terrible names like “Orange Hitler” yet they say it’s racist that O’Reilly commented on the wig. It’s actually really funny…

“He has disrespected the office”…How’s that Maxine?

Maxine is the worst enemy of the black community and Americans! She needs the struggle to continue so she can be reelected. Wouldn’t it be dangerous to her reelection if Donald Trump was successful at helping the black community?
The fear mongering is how she gets reelected! Remember the housing crisis? Maxine was responsible for much of the crash in housing yet she’s never taken responsibility for it. She and Barnie Frank pushed and pushed to get home loans for people who should have never owned a home!
The black community should run this woman out of town!

MAXINE WATERS AND WHY THE MORTGAGE CRISIS HAPPENED:

The Growing Government Hand

In the period 1989-2008, topping the list of recipients of contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Dodd (D-Connecticut), who received $165,400. Second on the list is Sen. Obama (D-Illinois), receiving $126,349 with only three years in the Senate. Rep. Frank (D-Massachusetts), received $42,350.

February 1990

Madeline Talbott, a well-known radical ACORN leader and banking industry agitator, challenged the merger of a Chicago thrift, Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, who responded that they were being bullied into irresponsible “affirmative-action lending policy.”

1991

ACORN interfered with a House Banking Committee meeting for two days protesting a move to bring CRA reform.

1992

Enforcement of CRA was “sporadic,” as the Washington Times notes, until a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study asserted that there were “substantially higher denial rates for black and Hispanic applicants than for white applicants.” Co-author Lynn Browne was approached by co-author Alicia Munnell to do the study because “community activists were complaining that mortgage loans were not being made in minority communities.”

According to the Times, however, “the study had mishandled statistics on minority default rates. When the errors were accounted for, the same study showed no evidence that nonwhite mortgage applicants were being discriminated against.”
Frank Quaratiello, writing in the Boston Herald, cites Stan Liebowitz, “My guess is that they were interested in finding a particular result.” Said Liebowitz, “Richard Syron was head of the Boston Fed at the time. He went on to be the head of Freddie Mac. They were looking for mortgage discrimination and they found it.”
According to Quaratiello, Syron became Freddie Mac CEO and chairman in 2003 and “faced increasing pressure to buy up more and more risky mortgages, some of which the Boston Fed’s guide had, in effect, served to legitimize.” Regarding Syron’s total compensation in 2007 of $18.3 million, Liebowitz reportedly quipped, “Nice reward for presiding over unprofessional research behavior, bankrupting Freddie Mac and crippling our financial system, all in the name of politically correct lending.”

September 1992

The Chicago Tribune described the ACORN agenda as “affirmative action lending.” And, writes Kurtz, “ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.”

October 1992

Congress, enacting the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, allowed legislation to “amend and extend certain laws relating to housing and community development.” The Act created the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) within HUD to “ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are adequately capitalized and operating safely.” It also “established HUD-imposed housing goals for financing of affordable housing and housing in central cities and other rural and underserved areas.”

Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) warned about the impending danger non-regulated GSEs posed. As the Washington Post reports, his concern was that Congress was “hamstringing” the regulator. Complaint was that OFHEO was a “weak regulator.” Leach worried that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were changing “from being agencies of the public at large to money machines for the stockholding few.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) countered, as the Post reports, “the companies served a public purpose. They were in the business of lowering the price of mortgage loans.”

September 1993

The Chicago Sun-Times reports an initiative led by ACORN’s Talbott with five area lenders “participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories.” Kurtz notes that the initiative included two of her former targets, Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings, who had apparently capitulated under pressure.

July 1994

Represented by Obama and others, Plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Citibank had “intentionally discriminated against the Plaintiffs on the basis of race with respect to a credit transaction,” calling their action “racial discrimination and discriminatory redlining practices.”

November 1994

President Clinton addresses homeownership: “I think we all agree that more Americans should own their own homes, for reasons that are economic and tangible and reasons that are emotional and intangible but go to the heart of what it means to harbor, to nourish, to expand the American dream. . . . I am determined to see that you have the opportunity and together we can make that opportunity for the young families of our country. I am committed to a new and unprecedented partnership between industry leaders and community leaders and Government to recommit our Nation to the idea of homeownership and to create more homeowners than ever before.”

June 1995

Republicans had won control of Congress and planned CRA reforms. The Clinton Administration, however, allied with Rep. Frank, Sen. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Waters (D-California), did an end-around by directing HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo to inject GSEs into the subprime mortgage market.

As Kurtz notes,”ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the CRA from GOP reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond.” What resulted was the broadening of the “acceptability of risky subprime loans throughout the financial system, thus precipitating our current crisis.”

The administration announced the bold new homeownership strategy which included monumental loosening of credit standards and imposition of subprime lending quotas. HUD reported that President Clinton had committed “to increasing the homeownership rate to 67.5 percent by the year 2000.” The plan was “to reduce the financial, information, and systemic barriers to homeownership” which was “amplified by local partnerships at work in over 100 cities.”

Kurtz concludes, “Urged on by ACORN, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration helped push tolerance for high-risk loans through every sector of the banking system — far beyond the sort of banks originally subject to the CRA. So it was the efforts of ACORN and its Democratic allies that first spread the subprime virus from the CRA to Fannie and Freddie and thence to the entire financial system. Soon, Democratic politicians and regulators actually began to take pride in lowered credit standards as a sign of ‘fairness’ — and the contagion spread.”

Attorney General Janet Reno, with a number of bank lending discrimination settlements already, sternly announces, “We will tackle lending discrimination wherever it appears.” With the new policy in full force, “No loan is exempt; no bank is immune.” “For those who thumb their nose at us, I promise vigorous enforcement,” reiterated Reno.

1997

HUD Secretary Cuomo said “GSE presence in the subprime market could be of significant benefit to lower-income families, minorities, and families living in underserved areas . . .”

1998

By falsifying signatures on Fannie Mae accounting transactions, $200 million in expenses was shifted from 1998 to later periods, thereby triggering $27.1 million in bonuses for top executives. James A. Johnson received $1.932 million; Franklin D. Raines received $1.11 million; Lawrence M. Small received $1.108 million; Jamie S. Gorelick received $779,625; Timothy Howard received $493,750; Robert J. Levin received $493,750.

April 1998

HUD announced a $2.1 billion settlement with AccuBanc Mortgage Corp. for alleged discrimination against minority loan applicants. The funds would provide poor families with down payments and low interest mortgages. Announcing the Accubank settlement, Secretary Cuomo said, “discrimination isn’t always that obvious. Sometimes more subtle but in many ways more insidious, an institutionalized discrimination that’s hidden behind a smiling face.”

October 2003

Fannie Mae discloses $1.2 billion accounting error.

November 2003

Council of the Economic Advisers Chairman Greg Mankiw warned, “The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole. This risk is a systemic issue also because the debt obligations of the housing GSEs are widely held by other financial institutions. The importance of GSE debt in the portfolios of other financial entities means that even a small mistake in GSE risk management could have ripple effects throughout the financial system,” from a White House release.

Mankiw explains that any “legislation to reform GSE regulation should empower the new regulator with sufficient strength and credibility to reduce systemic risk.” To reduce the potential for systemic instability, the regulator would have “broad authority to set both risk-based and minimum capital standards” and “receivership powers necessary to wind down the affairs of a troubled GSE,” says a White House release.

February 2004

Fiscal Year 2005 Budget again highlights the risk posed by the explosive growth of the GSEs and their low levels of required capital, and called for creation of a new, world-class regulator: “The Administration has determined that the safety and soundness regulators of the housing GSEs lack sufficient power and stature to meet their responsibilities, and therefore . . . should be replaced with a new strengthened regulator,” reports a White House release.

Mankiw cautions Congress to “not take [the financial market’s] strength for granted.” Again, the call from the Administration was to reduce this risk by “ensuring that the housing GSEs are overseen by an effective regulator,” says a White House release.

June 2004

Deputy Secretary of Treasury Samuel Bodman spotlights the risk posed by the GSEs and called for reform, saying “We do not have a world-class system of supervision of the housing government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), even though the importance of the housing financial system that the GSEs serve demands the best in supervision to ensure the long-term vitality of that system. Therefore, the Administration has called for a new, first class, regulatory supervisor for the three housing GSEs: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banking System,” the White House reports.

September 2004

OFHEO reported that Fannie Mae and CEO Raines had manipulated its accounting to overstate its profits. Congress and the Bush administration sought strong new regulation and authority to put the GSEs under conservatorship if necessary. As the Washington Post reports, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac responded by orchestrating a major campaign “by traditional allies including real estate agents, home builders and mortgage lenders. Fannie Mae ran radio and television ads ahead of a key Senate committee meeting, depicting a Latino couple who fretted that if the bill passed, mortgage rates would go up.” Again, GSE pressure prevailed.

October 2004

Rep. Baker again warned about the coming crisis in the Wall Street Journal: “Then there’s the lesson of a company, Frankenstein-like, seemingly grown so powerful that it can intimidate and arrogantly flout all accountability to the very government that created it.”

Baker adds, “Although their bonds bear the disclaimer ‘not backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,’ the market does not believe it and looks right past the companies’ risk strategies to the taxpayers’ pockets.”

In a subcommittee testimony, Democrats vehemently reject regulation of Fannie Mae in the face of dire warning of a Fannie Mae oversight report. A few of them, Black Caucus members in particular, are very angry at the OFHEO Director as they attempt to defend Fannie Mae and protect their CRA extortion racket.

Chairman Baker (R-Louisiana): “It is indeed a very troubling report, but it is a report of extraordinary importance not only to those who wish to own a home, but as to the taxpayers of this country who would pay the cost of the clean up of an enterprise failure. . . . The analysis makes clear that more resources must be brought to bear to ensure the highest standards of conduct are not only required, but more importantly, they are actually met.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California): “Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York): “And as well as the fact that I’m just pissed off at OFHEO, because if it wasn’t for you I don’t think that we’d be here in the first place, and now the problem that we have and that we’re faced with is: maybe some individuals who wanted to do away with GSEs in the first place, you’ve given them an excuse to try to have this forum so that we can talk about it and maybe change the, uh, the direction and the mission of what the GSEs had, which they’ve done a tremendous job. There’s been nothing that was indicated that’s wrong, you know, with uh Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac has come up on its own. And the question that then presents is the competence that, that, that, that your agency has, uh, with reference to, uh, uh, deciding and regulating these GSEs. Uh, and so, uh, I wish I could sit here and say that I’m not upset with you, but I am very upset because, you know, what you do is give, you know, maybe giving any reason to, as Mr. Gonzales said, to give someone a heart surgery when they really don’t need it.”

Rep. Ed Royce (R-California): “In addition to our important oversight role in this committee, I hope that we will move swiftly to create a new regulatory structure for Fannie Mae, for Freddie Mac, and the federal home loan banks.”

Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Missouri): “This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Raines.”

Rep. Ed Royce (R-California): “There is a very simple solution. Congress must create a new regulator with powers at least equal to those of other financial regulators, such as the OCC or Federal Reserve.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York): “What would make you, why should I have confidence? Why should anyone have confidence, and uh, in, in you as a regulator at this point?”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut): “And we passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which was a very tough response to that, and then I realized that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wouldn’t even come under it. They weren’t under the ‘34 act, they weren’t under the ‘33 act, they play by their own rules, and I and I’m tempted to ask how many people in this room are on the payroll of Fannie Mae, because what they do is they basically hire every lobbyist they can possibly hire. They hire some people to lobby and they hire some people not to lobby so that the opposition can’t hire them.”

Rep. Artur Davis (D-Alabama): “So the concern that I have is you’re making very specific, what you have correctly acknowledged, broad and categorical judgments about the management of this institution, about the willfulness of practices that may or may not be in controversy. You’ve imputed various motives to the people running the organization. You went to the board and put a 48-hour ultimatum on them without having any specific regulatory authority to put that kind of ultimatum on ‘em. Uh, that sounds like some kind of an invisible line has been crossed.”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut): “Fannie Mae has manipulated, in my judgment, OFHEO for years. And for OFHEO to finally come out with a report as strong as it is, tells me that’s got to be the minimum not the maximum.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts): “Uh, I, this, you, you, you seem to me saying, ‘Well, these are in areas which could raise safety and soundness problems.’ I don’t see anything in your report that raises safety and soundness problems.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California): “Under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines, everything in the 1992 Act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals. What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission, a mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100% loans.”

Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Missouri): “I find this to be inconsistent and a and a rush to judgment. I get the feeling that the markets are not worried about the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae as OFHEO says that it is, but of course the markets are not political.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts): “But I have seen nothing in here that suggests that the safety and soundness are at issue, and I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as kind of a general shibboleth when it does not seem to me to be an issue.”

Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Illinois): “Mr. Raines, 1.1 million bonus and a $526,000 salary. Jamie Gorelick, $779,000 bonus on a salary of 567,000. This is, what you state on page eleven is nothing less than staggering.”

Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Illinois): “The 1998 earnings per share number turned out to be $3.23 and 9 mills, a result that Fannie Mae met the EPS maximum payout goal right down to the penny.”

Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Illinois): “Fannie Mae understood the rules and simply chose not to follow them that if Fannie Mae had followed the practices, there wouldn’t have been a bonus that year.”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut): “And you have about 3% of your portfolio set aside. If a bank gets below 4%, they are in deep trouble. So I just want you to explain to me why I shouldn’t be satisfied with 3%?”

Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae CEO: “Because banks don’t, there aren’t any banks who only have multifamily and single-family loans.”

Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae CEO: “These assets are so riskless that their capital for holding them should be under 2%.”

“The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Greenspan testified that the size of GSE portfolios “poses a risk to the global financial system. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to bail out the lenders [GSEs] . . . should one get into financial trouble.” He added, “If we fail to strengthen GSE regulation, we increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis . . . We put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States, a key ingredient of support for homeownership.”

Greenspan warned that if the GSEs “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road . . . We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

Bloomberg writes, “If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. . . . But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter. That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then.”

April 2005

Treasury Secretary John Snow again calls for GSE reform, “Events that have transpired since I testified before this Committee in 2003 reinforce concerns over the systemic risks posed by the GSEs and further highlight the need for real GSE reform to ensure that our housing finance system remains a strong and vibrant source of funding for expanding homeownership opportunities in America. . . . Half-measures will only exacerbate the risks to our financial system,” from a White House release.

May 2005

At AEI Online, Wallison warned that “allowing Fannie and Freddie to continue on their present course is simply to create risks for the taxpayers, and to the economy generally, in order to improve the profits of their shareholders and the compensation of their managements. It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit.”

January 2006

Chairman Greenspan, in a letter to Sens. Sununu, Hagel and Dole, warned that the GSE practice of buying their own MBS “creates substantial systemic risk while yielding negligible additional benefits for homeowners, renters, or mortgage originators.” He stated, “. . . the GSEs and their government regulator need specific and unambiguous Congressional guidance about the intended purpose and functions of Fannie’s and Freddie’s investment portfolios.”

March 2006

Sens. Sununu and Hagel introduced an amendment to a Lobbying Reform Bill directing GAO to study GSE lobbying and requiring HUD to audit the GSEs annually.

May 2006

After years of Democrats blocking the legislation, Sens. Hagel, Sununu, Dole and McCain write a letter to Majority Leader William Frist and Chairman Richard Shelby expressing demanding that GSE regulatory reform be “enacted this year” to avoid “the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the Housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

May 2006

Sen. McCain (R-Arizona) addressed the Senate, “Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were ‘illusions deliberately and systematically created’ by the company’s senior management. . . . Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. . . . OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.”

McCain stressed, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.”

In “A Nightmare Grows Darker,” the New York Times writes that the “democratization of credit” is “turning the American dream of homeownership into a nightmare for many borrowers.” The “newfangled mortgage loans” called “affordability loans” “represent 60 percent of foreclosures.”

September 2007

President Bush: “These institutions provide liquidity in the mortgage market that benefits millions of homeowners, and it is vital they operate safely and operate soundly. So I’ve called on Congress to pass legislation that strengthens independent regulation of the GSEs . . . the United States Senate needs to pass this legislation soon.”

2007-2008

The housing bubble began to burst, bad mortgages began to default, and finally the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac portfolios were revealed to be what they were, in collapse. And the testimony is evident as to why. As Wallison noted, “Fannie and Freddie were, I would say, the poster children for corporate welfare.”

September 2008

Rep. Arthur Davis, whose testimony is found above in October 2004, now admits Democrats were in error: “Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.”

Today 2008

The narrative is of another socialist experiment failed, this time a massive federal effort, imperiling the whole US banking industry. Facing this economic disaster, will an informed American people put their trust Obama’s socialist ideology to bring remedy? To do so is to trust in an acetylene torch to put out the fire.